Subject: RE: Is Burl Ives underated?
From:
Don Firth
Date: 21 Oct 10 - 02:08 PM
It was in the 1940s when I was a teenager that I used to listen to Burl Ives on the radio (Sunday afternoon, if I recall correctly). He talked about American history and sang folk songs related to the historical events he was discussing. I remember one program in particular in which he talked about the conception and building of the Erie canal and its importance in developing what was then thought of as "the West." Several songs, including "I Got a Mule and Her Name is Sal" and "When the E-ri-e was a-Risin.'" I learned more about the Erie canal that afternoon than I ever learned in any American history class
During the 1940s, to the general public, the names of Burl Ives and a young gal named Susan Reed were synonymous with folk music. And when I first became actively interested in folk music, one of the first sources for songs to learn that I pounced on were the records of Burl Ives—of which there were many. In 1952, the first time I went sifting through the folk music bin at Campus Music and Gallery looking specifically for records to learn songs from, there were about a dozen folk records, all 10" LPs. One Richard Dyer-Bennet, one Pete Seeger ("Darling Corey" on Folkways), one Lead Belly, one Josh White, one Susan Reed, and the rest were Burl Ives (all on Decca as I remember).
It wasn't until much later that Ives started singing frothy stuff like "Little Bitty Tear" and "Little White Duck" and such. A lot of fledgling singers such as myself regarded Burl Ives as "Big Daddy" well before he played Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Incidentally, it wasn't the role of Big Daddy that earned him his Oscar, it was the role of Rufus Hannassey in "The Big Country." Ives was a bloody brilliant actor!!
As to Burl Ives "naming" Pete Seeger, Richard Dyer-Bennet, and others as "Communists," as I understand it, Ives was one of the first to be called to testify and he had no idea of what the others, such as Pete, were going to do. He said, yes, they did sing for various labor organizations. "Why?" "Because they asked us to, and they paid us." "Who else sang with you?" He did name those with whom he had sung at these events. The committee could have easily found out anyway, so he wasn't telling them anything they didn't already know. "Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?" "No!" responded Ives. "How about your friends? Are any of them Communists?" "I don't know," Ives said, hedging a bit, because he did know, but he didn't particularly care. Then he said, "You'll have to ask them."
During the whole thing, the committee had made the assumption that labor organizations and the Communist Party were synonymous.
It wasn't until later that Ives heard Pete Seeger lay into the committee, saying that he was an American, he had the right to belong to any political party he chose to, and that the committee had no right to ask him what party he belonged to.
Later on, Woody Guthrie, not particularly a man to hold grudges, visited Burl Ives in California where they talked a lot and swapped a lot of songs. On Guthrie's return to New York, he was asked about Ives. "Burl is one very angry man," he said. "He's angry at himself because he wishes that he had responded like Pete did. But since he was first up, it hadn't occurred to him!"
So—I think this business of getting on Burl Ives' case for "naming his friends" every time his name is brought up is a bit uncharitable at best and kind of mean-spirited at worst.
While Alan Lomax was doing great work, but laboring in obscurity, Burl Ives—no flashy guitar and simple, straightforward singing—and Susan Reed with her sweet, somewhat naïve persona, accompanying herself on her Irish harp and zither, were the public faces of folk music in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Susan also got zapped by the committee. And her singing career never recovered. I often wondered why she had vanished from sight on the very eve of the folk music revival, and learned about her run-in with the committee just recently. She was about as much of a danger to the country as a mild-mannered kitten!
Don Firth
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